​A Horrible Combination: The Causes of the Dust Bowl

Practices such as overgrazing livestock on the land deprived the land of grasses. These grasses helped to hold the topsoil in place. Normally, before the Depression, “farmers had simply exhausted the land and then moved on to new farms on the western frontier. In the 1930s the frontier was closed, and the Depression forced farmers to reconsider their agricultural habits” (“Farmers and the Great Depression”). Unable to move to new land, the farmers had to continue working the land they had overgrazed and exhausted.

Other farm practices besides overgrazing threatened the land as well. There were numerous incidences of poor farming practices that endangered the land. Such practices included “plowing straight up and down inclines and hills and refusing to allow fields to lay fallow. Topsoil was accordingly exhausted or eroded, and unable to support productive crops” (“Farmers and the Great Depression”). This exhausted, eroded topsoil combined with years of severe drought from 1932-1935, allowed the disastrous dust storms of the 1930s Dust Bowl to occur.